A Food Blogger’s New Year’s Resolutions

New Year’s Resolution Checklist

Have you made any New Year’s resolutions? Are you struggling to keep them? Getting through those New Year’s goals can be overwhelming. That’s why we’ve compiled a simple list of New Year’s, blogging resolutions. Sometimes all you need to motivate is to see a few check marks on that long to-do list.

Change the Copyright of your site

Yes, you usually change this in March, but now is the time to change it to the current year. Easy fix. Done!

Move to SSL

With everyone favoring SSL these days (especially Google) now is the time to migrate to SSL. Depending on your web host this switch is likely free. Contact your hosting company today to get the ball rolling.

Check the Hosting

Hosting is one of the most overlooked elements of running a food site or food blog. We highly recommend WP Engine, in fact this site is hosted there.

Running the Latest version of your CMS?

There should be a clear indication when you login to your site if there is an update available. Easy!

Check Optimize

Optimize is our publisher facing optimization page within the Publisher Console. It’s been designed to holistically look at your page, your setup and make recommendations on things that need attention. Many fixes are simple and can be handled by you, but if you need any help support is just a click away! You can see your custom optimize report here: https://console.gourmetads.com/?page=console_optimize

Make sure you have the current Ads.txt

A complete Ads.txt ensures you are eligible for campaigns from all our demand partners. IF you are missing any entries that partner will NOT buy ad space on your site. This is a simple fix and can be automated if you are using our plugin. When checking Optimize (above) your ads.txt will be analyzed as well. See FAQ about ads.txt: here and get the latest version of the plugin here

Check your Page Speed and make Simple Updates

Any site can benefit from a jump in page speed. Page speed ensures a better user experience and positively affects SEO ranking. More often than not we find image sizes to be the biggest offender and thankfully the simplest to fix. A tool we use to check is Google’s Pagespeed insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and a simple plugin for image compression is WP Smush.

Update Popular pages and Write Timeless Content (like this page)

We’ve been at this for over ten years now! And one thing we’ve learned is that good content doesn’t expire. Pick a popular topic or existing popular post and make it timeless by leaving out specific dates. Topics could include easy dinners, healthy dinners, kitchen organization tips or even New Year’s resolutions! This post used to be very specific, we’ve revamped it and made it timeless. Which of your posts can be made timeless?

Check out Food Planning Calendar and other Food blogging tips

Check out our resources page in Console for simple blogging tips: https://console.gourmetads.com/?page=console_resources Or if you’re not yet a member of our network White papers and Guides can be found here: https://publishers.gourmetads.com/resource-category/whitepapers-guides/